AT 8am on a Saturday morning there is silence in Class 8A at Kautilya Government Sarvodaya Boys’ Senior Secondary School in Delhi. The pupils sit with their eyes closed; the teacher has told them to concentrate on the noises around them.

THE 80 or so pupils in Class 9 of YDVP Inter College, a private school in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, chorus “good morning” to the visitor, and then turn their attention back to the maths teacher.

ON APRIL 1st 1964 units of the Brazilian army toppled the democratic government of João Goulart, a left-wing president. They did so with the support of the elected civilian governors of the three most important states—Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo—and much of the congress.

A STEEP hill and a concrete wall divide the worlds of Gabriela Moura, a student from Paraisópolis, a favela in the city of São Paulo, and Roberto Inglese, a lawyer from the prosperous neighbourhood of Morumbi.

THERE are no iron rules of politics, but some patterns repeat often enough to resemble physical laws. In America, perhaps the most reliable one is that voters express buyer’s remorse in mid-term elections.

ONE measure of racial progress is that African-Americans are as likely to vote in elections as whites. Black voters were actually slightly more likely to turn out than whites in the 2008 and 2012 presidential contests.

BOOZE and drugs usually belong together like Fred and Ginger. But not, it seems, in California’s wine region. Wine-makers are fretting that recreational marijuana use, which became legal in the state in January, could challenge their dominance of what is delightfully known as people’s “intoxication budgets”.

“WHAT you have to remember”, says Ronald Brisé, in a conference room several storeys above downtown Orlando, “is that Florida is like three to five states in one.” Spend more than a couple of hours talking Florida politics and some version of Mr Brisé’s dictum will emerge.

WAVERING voters in competitive congressional districts are not going to cast their ballots based on when America’s ambassador to the UN resigned. That Nikki Haley chose to do so on October 9th is nonetheless odd.

PICTURE if you can Bernie Sanders, the democratic-socialist senator, as a young lad of four. That is how old Mr Sanders was in 1945 when Harry Truman announced his vision for single-payer health care, in which the government pays all costs.

IT IS lunchtime and a queue is forming for the burgers at Krowarzywa, voted the city’s best in an online poll: students, families, businessmen in suits. This is Warsaw, where (you might think) lunch is usually a slab of meat with a side order of sausage.

BRITAIN likes to see itself as a leader in the fight against illicit finance and corruption. The government has recently been talking even tougher, as worsening relations with Russia have focused attention on the number of oligarchs who have interests in London.

IT HAS been over a week since Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi journalist and government critic (pictured), walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to get paperwork for a marriage. No one has seen him since.

FOR decades scientists have warned that rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels risk adversely affecting the climate, increasing ocean acidity, the frequency of freak weather and other symptoms of planetary ill-health.